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Dogs left to their own devices will wander around, spending most of their time in meeting areas, and attacking any hostiles they see.

As with any friendly creature, dogs can spot ambushers and thieves. You can assign dogs to restraints to act as guard dogs. Guard dogs work particularly well when placed behind a hall of traps or other siege-breaking devices. The traps will prevent aggressive invaders from harming the dogs, while the dogs prevent thieves from sneaking past the traps into the base. (Ideally, the dogs should be out of view of the trap corridor to prevent injury from ranged weapons.) Hunting dogs may be particularly well-suited to guard duty because of their improved observer skills.

You can assign a war dog or hunting dog to a dwarf via his preferences menu (v, select dwarf, p, e) to help him in combat. It will follow the dwarf like a pet.

Once a dog is assigned to a dwarf it can not be unassigned nor placed in a cage. A work-around for this is to train the dog with the dwarf you want the dog to follow. Unassigned war dogs and hunting dogs follow the dwarf who trained them, but can still be caged. If you use one or two dedicated animal trainers to train dogs, you may notice they will be followed by a large pack of them, along with their puppies. Assigned dogs can be pastured; this is another option for keeping them away from danger if you have some advance warning. It's also a good idea if you decide to train the owner in a danger room. War dogs can still be slaughtered for food, even if they have sustained serious injuries.

Note:Using a civilian alert to keep civilians away from fighting affects war dogs as well, stopping them from following your soldiers into combat.Bug:1058

"A hunting animal will target the creature its owner is targeting if the owner is hunting, and it will be sneaking without a movement penalty if it is reasonably close to its hunting owner. A hunting animal notices creatures from farther away, although this isn't exactly effective if it decides to target what its owner is targeting. It all needs a bit of work, but that is true of hunting in general." -Toady One, long ago

Because of their training, war dogs do more damage in combat than untrained dogs.

Against heavily armored and armed opponents, dogs (war or hunting) can die quite easily, but that doesn't mean they are useless. Also, although a war dog is not nearly as dangerous against an armored opponent as an axe lord, they occasionally get lucky, and a pack of war dogs can be very dangerous indeed. They can also be used as walking meatshields, taking hits that would have otherwise injured your dwarves.

For this reason, some players attach them to any permanent close-combat military, and/or to any dwarf that regularly steps outside. However, the down side to assigning them to military dwarves is that they are very likely to die, since dogs move much faster than fully-armored dwarves and thus frequently charge in unassisted. A dead pet causes a serious unhappiness spike, and tantrums with legendary weapon skills mixed in can really maximize the fun. Fortunately they're not cats so you can make them unavailable as pets.

For breeding purposes, female war dogs are no worse than dogs: they can give birth to puppies as well. Male war dogs also can play the role of their civil counterparts. You probably don't want to train the female dogs though, so you can keep them as breeding stock along with a few studs, just like you do with any other animal.

In real life, the dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is the same species as the wolf (Canis lupus lupus). It gradually differentiated from wild wolves due to domestication by humans. In Dwarf Fortress, taming wolves will not, no matter how much time passes, result in dogs.